Autumn 2026
Ninety Degrees of Nothing
Seven dancers, one hour of rehearsal footage thrown away, and a phrase that never resolves where it says it will.
- First performed
- 2,026
- Running time
- 42 minutes
- Dancers
- 7
- Music
- Éliane Radigue, and forty seconds of silence
- Travelled
- 11.6 radii
The piece began as an argument about whether a phrase has to arrive. It does not. Every sequence in it sets up a destination in the door plane and then leaves through the table plane instead, and after forty minutes the audience stops expecting the arrival — which is the only thing the piece is about.
Making it
Built in eleven weeks, of which four were spent on the first ninety seconds. The company voted on whether to keep the silence at the end. It was six to one.
The phrase, written down
8 reaches · 38% of them in the door plane · 11.6 radii travelled
- High right Door plane start
- Left forward Table plane 1.70
- Deep left Door plane 1.05
- Right back Table plane 1.70
- High left Door plane 1.70
- Forward deep Wheel plane 1.70
- Back high Wheel plane 2.00
- Right forward Table plane 1.70
The last column is the straight-line distance from the previous reach, in kinesphere radii. Two is right across the body; the shortest possible step between two of the twelve is 1.05.
How it is danced
Basic Effort Action
Slash
Strong, sudden, indirect. A limb thrown through the whole reach at once.
- Weight
- How much the body commits its mass. Not how hard the dancer works.
- Time
- The attitude to time, not the tempo. A slow piece can be full of suddenness.
- Space
- Whether attention goes everywhere at once or to one place.
- Flow
- How readily the movement could be stopped half way. Not part of the action names.
